Nov 17, 2013

Most SSA Employees Satisfied With Their Jobs

According to a new Office of Personnel Management survey, 65% of Social Security employees express satisfaction with their jobs. While this is down considerably from 2010 when 74% of Social Security employees expressed job satisfaction, it is still higher than the government wide employee satisfaction rate of 59%.

5 comments:

Anonymous
said...

In the field, I would bet that satisfaction varies dramatically from office to office. In my office, the entire staff is unhappy and dreads coming to work, because we have a poor manager. It's stressful demanding work, and if the person in charge is a bully without people skills, everyone is miserable and unfortunately this often affects how the work and the public are treated.

Hopefully you'll get some comments from field office employees who *like* their workplace. This would cheer us up.

I really loved my job in the FO before I retired last year. I worked with great people and had a great manager--I have had bad managers before, and it really makes a difference. The workload was just impossible, however, and nothing could overcome that. The fact that I could retire probably helped my outlook. Many people feel overwhelmed and helpless and that can affect things, as well.

Many of those field managers come to HQ for a while and the bad ones? They remain bad. Take all credit for themselves, view subordinates as cogs, believe that they know all the answers (always fun to have two of them not agreeing on something) and are always making remarks about HQ work not being "real" work.

Like the boss, like the challenges of the work itself, like helping people, like catching people committing fraud, like most of my co-workers (although we are not 'family' like some of them say). The heavy workload is impossible to complete both timely and correctly, supervisors alternate between telling you what a great job you are doing to asking you to do more to asking you why you haven't done enough. All with a straight face. Even when a few months before they were in your shoes complaining about the demands placed on them by their supervisors. There are many days that I just want to scream. I would like the job a lot more if I had time to do the job the way it should be done.

A personal pet peeve is that there is little to no ramification for poor quality work and errors. I have to keep reminding myself that it is not my job to fix every error made by someone else, but when it lands on my desk, I can't ignore it. I just can't.

This number sounds about right. Even within our ODAR. I'd guess about a third of folks here are more grumbly than satisfied. But most folks here are competent and responsible, and there are only one or two obligatory bad apples. But as alluded to above, I think management is a key factor. We have good managers across the board--good group supervisors, good HOD, and good HOCALJ. That really can make all the difference.